'The Dyer's Hand': Literature and Translation Conference
TORCH warmly invites registrations to an all-day conference on the subject of:
'The Dyer's Hand, Literature and Translation'
This event will be led by Professor Érico Nogueira, the TORCH/All Souls Global South Visiting Professor for 2022/23.
All welcome to attend!
A sandwich lunch will be provided, please enter any dietary requirements during the ticket registration process.
Please visit this page to register for a free ticket
‘The Dyer’s Hand: Poetry and Translation’, is an all-day event taking place at TORCH Seminar Room (3rd floor, Radcliffe Humanities Building) on 10 November. It will be exploring the relations and tensions between the composition and the translation of poetry, from Antiquity to the present. Openly endorsing diversity and interdisciplinarity, it features scholars, poets and translators with richly different backgrounds, and pays special tribute to some intersections of Anglophone and Lusophone literatures.
Programme
10.00 – In medias res: a very short introduction and welcome (Érico Nogueira)
10.15 – SESSION 1
Tom Earle – Bragança Restauração and Stuart Restoration: Politics and Rhetoric in Fanshawe's partial Latin Translation of Os Lusíadas (1663)
Stuart Gillespie – Scholarship and Translation: Walter Pater, Ezra Pound, Allen Tate, and J. W. Mackail's Pervigilium Veneris
Chair: Ruth Parkes
11.15 – SESSION 2
Phillip Rothwell and Simon Park – Translating from the Portuguese
Chair: Érico Nogueira
12.15 – 13.00: Lunchbreak
13.15 – SESSION 3
Erica McAlpine – Translation as Apprenticeship: Writing Poetry with Horace
Peter McDonald – Turning Poems into Poems
Chair: Ruth Parkes
14.15 – SESSION 4
Daniel Jonas – The ‘Brandian’ Act: On Poetry and Translation
Marco Catalão – Works and Days of a Contemporary Poet
Chair: Cláudia Pazos Alonso
15.15 – SESSION 5
Lesley Saunders – Nominy-Dominy: Poetry Composition and the Anxious Discipline of Translation
Max De Gaynesford – Poetry Acts in Translation
Chair: Érico Nogueira
16.15 – SESSION 6
Érico Nogueira – Some Secret’s Secrets
Chris Miller – The Secret Death
Chair: Stephen Harrison
The Speakers and Moderators
Cláudia Pazos Alonso is Professor of Portuguese and Gender Studies, University of Oxford and Fellow of Wadham College. Her research interests range widely across 19th and 20th century Lusophone Literature, especially issues of reception and canon-formation. Book publications include Francisca Wood and Nineteenth-Century Periodical Culture: pressing for change (2020); Antigone Daughters? Gender, Genealogy, and the Politics of Authorship in 20th-Century Portuguese Women's Writing (2011, with Hilary Owen), Imagens do Eu na Poesia de Florbela Espanca (1997), and co-edited volumes such as Reading Literature in Portuguese. Commentaries in Honour of Tom Earle (2013), A Companion to Portuguese Literature (2009), and Closer to the Wild Heart. Essays on Clarice Lispector (2002).
Marco Catalão is a Brazilian writer. Recipient of grants and fellowships from the Brazilian National Library (2008), the National Endowment for the Arts (2010) and the Ministry of Culture (2018). Finalist of the International Playwriting Competition (BBC World Service, 2011), he was awarded the Luso-Brazilian Award of Playwriting (2010) for Agro Negócio (Acridbusiness). He is the author of As asas do albatroz (The wings of the albatross), awarded the Rio Prize for the best Brazilian book of poetry (2018).
Tom Earle retired as King John II Professor of Portuguese at Oxford in 2014. He has published widely on Portuguese literature, especially of the Renaissance period.
Max De Gaynesford studied History at Balliol, and took to Philosophy, first as a Fellow of Lincoln, then at the College of William and Mary, and now as Professor at the University of Reading, publishing articles and five books on the philosophy of language and mind, including The Rift in the Lute: Attuning Poetry and Philosophy (2017).
Stuart Gillespie (University of Glasgow) is editor of the journal Translation and Literature (Edinburgh UP), and was (with Peter France) general editor of the multi-volume Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. His interests in historical English verse translation have led most recently to an edited collection of hundreds of previously unknown translations taken from unprinted manuscript sources: Newly Recovered English Classical Translations, 1600-1800 (Oxford UP, 2018).
Stephen Harrison is Senior Research Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford and Professor of Latin Literature in the University of Oxford. He is author and/or editor of many books on Latin literature and its modern reception/translation, including recently co-edited collections on Seamus Heaney and the Classics (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Cupid and Psyche: The Reception of Apuleius’ Love Story since 1600 (De Gruyter, 2020).
Amongst his current projects is the use of classics by the English First World War poets Rupert Brooke and Charles Sorley.
Adriana X. Jacobs is Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at the University of Oxford and author of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry (2018, University of Michigan Press). Her translations of contemporary Hebrew poetry include Vaan Nguyen's The Truffle Eye (2021, Zephyr Press), for which she was awarded the 2022 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Merav Givoni Hrushovski's End— (2022, Carrion Bloom Books).
Daniel Jonas is a Portuguese poet, playwright and translator. He is the author of Sonótono (2006) and Nó (2014), which made his reputation as one of the most notable poets of his generation. His many translations feature Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Erica McAlpine is Associate Professor of English at Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow of St Edmund Hall. Her first collection of poems, The Country Gambler (Shearsman, 2016), includes both original poems and creative translations of Horace’s Odes. Her academic book The Poet’s Mistake appeared two years ago from Princeton University Press and recently won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize from the British Academy. Her essays and poems regularly appear in journals including the TLS, the Spectator, and The American Scholar.
Peter McDonald is a Northern Irish poet and critic. His Collected Poems were published in 2012, and his latest collection is The Gifts of Fortune (Carcanet, 2020). He has translated from Latin and Greek, and his version of The Homeric Hymns (Carcanet, 2016) was shortlisted for the London Hellenic Prize, and was Translation Choice of the Poetry Book Society. Since 1999, he has been a Student and Tutor at Christ Church Oxford, and is Professor of British and Irish Poetry in the University of Oxford.
Chris Miller is a senior translator specialising in fine-arts translation from French. A Qualified Member of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, he has translated more than sixty books.
Érico Nogueira is Professor of Latin at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Brazil. Widely regarded as one of the most important Brazilian poets writing today, he has translated authors as diverse and challenging as St Augustine and Geoffrey Hill, and written extensively on metrics and versification. He is the current TORCH / All Souls Global South Professor.
Simon Park is Associate Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Portuguese at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on literature from across the Portuguese-speaking world in the Early Modern period. He is particularly interested in the Sociology of Literature, Literary History, and History of the Book, and combines digital approaches to texts with philology and close reading.
Ruth Parkes is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. Her research focuses upon the Latin epic tradition and its reception in Latin literature, including neo-Latin texts. She has published extensively on the works of Statius and Claudian.
Phillip Rothwell is the King John II Professor of Portuguese, and author of Pepetela and the MPLA: The Ethical Evolution of a Revolutionary Writer. He has translated fiction by the Portuguese novelists Helder Macedo and Isabela Figuereido into English.
Lesley Saunders’ collection Nominy-Dominy (Two Rivers Press, 2018) is an extended praise-song for the Greek and Latin literature she grew up with as a schoolgirl. Her translations – including the poem that won the 2016 Stephen Spender award – of renowned Portuguese poet Maria Teresa Horta were published as Point of Honour (Two Rivers Press, 2019). Lesley’s most recent poetry collections are This Thing of Blood & Love (Two Rivers Press, 2022) and, with Rebecca Swainston, Days of Wonder (Hippocrates Press, 2021), a poetic-artistic record of the first year of the Covid pandemic.
